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How electricity has the power to transform the lives of girls around the world

Muslim girls study in the light of candles inside a madrasa or religious school during power outage near New Delhi. One of the reasons that India’s economy grew a mere 7 per cent in 2012, down from 10 per cent in 2010, was because of repeated problems in the country’s power sector.
(PARIVARTAN SHARMA / REUTERS FILE PHOTO)

Girls who lived in the coastal village of Uroa, Zanzibar, used to wake up with little to look forward to.

They spent most of their waking hours tending to the same dreary chore: traversing a well-worn path that runs between a fresh-water well and their fishing village on the white-sand shore of the Indian Ocean.

But in the early 1990s, many of the 2,000 homes in Uroa were hooked up to Tanzania’s electrical grid and the lives of young women were transformed.

Electricity-powered pumps allowed housewives immediate access to fresh water from underground reservoirs. As their fathers paddled out to search for kingfish and their mothers gathered near the shore to harvest seaweed, young girls started spending their days in a classroom instead of hauling water buckets.

Today, 95 per cent of school-aged girls go to school in Uroa, the same number as boys, says Tanja Winther, a Norwegian anthropologist who spent more than a year studying access-to-electricity issues in Zanzibar.

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“Electricity has really allowed girls in that community to have the same access to education as boys, and that’s a huge deal,” said Winther, author of The Impact of Electricity.

Cost of power

It’s hard to overstate the impact of electricity. Without it, students struggle to study at night, depressing literacy rates. Governments that lack electricity infrastructure struggle to govern when there is no power for computers. And entrepreneurs struggle to run their businesses with no power source.

A lack of electricity has clipped more than 2 per cent off the annual growth rate of sub-Saharan African countries, the New York Times reported in 2007, citing World Bank statistics. And one of the reasons that India’s economy grew a mere 7 per cent in 2012, down from 10 per cent in 2010, was because of repeated problems in the country’s power sector.

The British non-profit Practical Action said in March that so-called energy poverty has left more than 1 million people without access to adequate health care as surgeons perform operations in the dark, medical supplies aren’t sterilized and clinics can’t properly preserve vaccines.

The United Nations has made it a goal to ensure worldwide access to electricity by 2030. Yet amid a host of innovative technologies — think of Google’s Glass, 3-D printed guns and Chris Hadfield using social media in space — the World Bank and International Energy Agency in a new report called Global Tracking Framework say it’s doubtful that goal will be met.

Since 1990, some 1.7 billion people, including the few thousand in Uroa, have acquired access to electricity and 1.6 billion have gained access to cleaner cooking fuels. About 83 per cent of the world’s population has access to electricity, up from 76 per cent in 1990.

The trouble is, overall population growth has outpaced the rate of growth in electrification. Although access to electricity grew 1.2 per cent per year between 1990 and 2010, the world’s population grew 1.3 per cent each year. To reach the UN’s goal, the growth rate would have to be 2.6 per cent a year from 2010 to 2030, the report says.

In 2009, about $9 billion was invested in new electricity projects, says Dan Dorner, a France-based economist with the International Energy Agency (IEA), but “business as usual would leave 12 per cent of the world’s population in 2030 without electricity,” the World Bank/IEA report says because at least $49 billion a year would be necessary.

The cost of installing renewable energy projects such as solar and wind power has plunged during the past decade and renewable energy now accounts for about 18 per cent of the world’s energy production, up by 16.6 per cent in 1990, says World Bank official Vivian Foster, the report’s lead author.

Of the 1.2 billion people without electricity, 87 per cent are either in sub-Saharan Africa or South Asia. India, a country of 1.2 billion, has 306.2 million people living in the dark. Nigeria is No. 2, with 82.4 million without electricity, followed by Bangladesh (66.6 million) and Ethiopia (63.9 million.)

Dorner says it’s become clear that governments cannot be counted on to finance the majority of electricity-related investment. “The private sector has been, and will continue to play a big role here,” he says.

The report offers a glimmer of good news.

“China and India, Vietnam and Brazil, these countries have done so much to bring power to people that it shows it can be done,” Dorner says. “This is not impossible.”

In India, for example, an average 24 million more people have received access to electricity during recent years as the cost of renewable energy sources falls. The World Bank/IEA report says the cost of wind energy investments has plunged from $2,500 per kilowatt/hour in the mid-1980s to as low as $630 in 2012.

Similarly, the cost of solar systems is down to $750 per kilowatt/hour from $7,000 over the same time period.

In 2011, there was $277 billion in new investment in the renewable energy sector, the study said, citing Bloomberg data, twice the amount spent only four years earlier.

There are other ways to finance investment. One is ensuring that the people who use electricity and can afford to buy it are forced to pay for it. The World Bank estimates $4 billion in electricity goes unaccounted for every year while the watchdog group Transparency International said in 2005 that Indians paid $480 million in bribes to put in new connections or lower their bills.

Access to energy

“For the past 50 years, we’ve seen electricity generated at large-scale power plants, transmitted to substations and then sent on to customers,” says Rajit Gadh, a mechanical and aerospace engineering professor at UCLA.

Gadh says most new installations will be through “mini-grids” servicing 10 to 20 homes.

“You’re also going to see changing technology to make those mini-grids more energy efficient,” he says. “When the customer isn’t using power, maybe when they are out in the fields during the day, they’ll be able to sell the power that their solar systems have captured back to the grid so it can be used by other customers.”

Gadh says a number of companies are developing lower-cost technologies ranging from solar panels to low-energy light-emitting diodes.

At a “Lighting Africa” conference in Nairobi in 2010, a World Bank project that highlighted private-sector energy solutions for the poor, The Economist magazine reported 50 lighting companies showcased their products, up from only a handful the previous year. One firm called D.light has developed a $10 solar-power system that generates 12 hours of light after charging for a full day.

Another firm, India’s Husk Power Systems, uses old diesel generators with biomass gasifiers that burn rice husks, The Economist reported. Wires are hung between bamboo poles to offer power to some 600 families per generator.

Other generators that can power refrigerators to chill milk or vital medicines are powered by methane from cow manure.

“You would not believe the new technologies and innovations we see on a daily basis,” says Anil Gupta, head of India’s National Innovation Foundation. “One of my favourites is a windmill made in Assam that’s very cheap and made of bamboo.”

In the U.S., scientists are developing methods of generating electricity to produce hydrogen from water to power cars. In Oslo, a city of 1.4 million, the separation of organic garbage is allowing the city to produce bio gas, which is powering buses in the city’s downtown core.

Here in Canada, researchers have developed a technique designed for the military that generates electricity with each soldier’s stride. That could be a huge cost saver in remote regions, where the cost to transport batteries can run into the hundreds of dollars.

Alongside new technologies come new ways to pay for them.

Crowd-sourcing is increasingly popular. Mosaic Inc. has created a model where initial installation costs for solar panels are paid for by investors who are later paid back with interest. Mosaic lists projects through an online marketplace and investors provide capital that’s used to buy and install rooftop solar panels. When the systems are complete and selling electricity, usually to building owners or occupants, the investors are repaid with interest.

When the California startup began operations in January, it advertised investors could earn a 4.5-per-cent return on rooftop power plants. Mosaic collected about $1.1 million in investments from 400 people to finance 12 rooftop solar plants in California, New Jersey and Arizona, the company said in January. The investors would be repaid in full in about nine years, the company said.

“It’s certainly true that a new technology could come along and help us address the energy issues we face now,” says the IAE’s Dorner, noting that fossil fuels account for $523 billion worth of subsidies, compared to $88 billion for renewable energy.

China alone has plans to build 27 nuclear power plants during its current five-year national plan, says Rob Stoner, associate director of the MIT Energy Initiative, where he oversees developing world energy research and education programs. “With all that’s going on, I’m definitely an optimist about universal energy access.”

During his recent tour of Africa, U.S. President Barack Obama announced a “Power Africa” initiative, pledging the U.S. would use $7 billion in assistance funneled through development agencies such as the Export-Import Bank and the Overseas Private Investment Corp. to bring electricity to 20 million homes and businesses.

During one photo-op, Obama praised the “Soccket Ball” developed by two researchers from Harvard University that captures and stores energy produced when it’s kicked that can be used to power lamps and other devices.

“I thought it was pretty cool,” Obama told reporters. “Soccket turns one of the most popular games in Africa into a source of electricity and progress. And you can imagine this in villages all across the continent.”

To be sure, the World Bank and IEA’s figures don’t tell the whole story.

Just because electricity is available in a community doesn’t mean the supply is reliable.

“Load shedding,” which refers to rotating power blackouts, has become all too well-known throughout the developing world.

On the hottest summer nights in New Delhi, as the city recovers from daytime temperatures that approach 50 C, the jumble of cars parked on sidestreets can often be found with motors running and passengers asleep inside, the air conditioning cranked high because there is no power in their homes.

“What good is it when you have no power all day and you’re a farmer and you have to stay up all night, hoping that you’ll get power for even a few hours to use to water your fields?” asks Gupta of India’s innovation foundation. “Even in the parts of India that have electricity, we still have a long way to go.”

In Pakistan, the lights go out for as many as 22 hours a day in the countryside, and 12-to14-hour outages in urban areas such as Faisalabad, a textiles hub, have forced factories to close their doors — giving militant groups a steady stream of recruits.

New kind of anxiety

Electricity can change communities in unexpected ways, said Winther, who has also documented electrical installations in rural India.

“Before electricity, it was a 12-hour day in Uroa,” she said. “When the sun went down, people moved around by kerosene lamp. The day was over. But now, with electricity, it’s a 24-hour day. It’s almost a carnival at night, with people gathering to watch TV together, speaking more confidently with loud voices at night.

“While that’s mostly a good change, there is also this feeling that comes with it of not feeling like there is enough time in the day, even with the extra time,” she said. “It’s a new kind of anxiety.”

Winther said in Uroa, as in most cultures, local custom calls for the homeowner who has a television to stay up until the viewing with guests is done.

“Usually, his wife has gone to bed hours earlier, so there are new complaints about a lack of intimacy,” Winther said.

And in Uroa, unlike India, the introduction of electricity has not led to cooking with electric stoves. While indoor electric stoves are widely praised because they don’t emit the carcinogenic fumes of wood fires, women in Uroa are leery of the stoves because of fears of being shocked.

Similarly, in Uroa, electricity hasn’t always meant more students studying at night. “That’s because they just don’t have that tradition there,” Winther said. “In India, even before electricity, most villages have a tradition of students having two or three hours of homework every night. It just isn’t there in Zanzibar.”

There have also been debt issues on the bucolic island, where many fishermen make about $1 or $2 per day and commit $200 or $300 to have electricity installed in their homes.

“For some reason the bills are in English, and there is an ignorance about having those monthly payments,” Winther said.

Even so, Winther said that on the whole, electricity has benefitted the small fishing village.

“Before they had it, girls did not go to school,” she said. “Now they do. I think that outweighs some of the other social issues that have cropped up.”

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